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Deborah Kendrick NATIONAL DISABILITY EMPLOYMENT AWARENESS MONTH:Understanding Our Own before We Take it Outside For one year between college and graduate school, I worked as a teaching assistant in a classroom for visually impaired children. One genuine enigma was a little boy named Bert. With his thick glasses, he had vision aplenty for reading large print. He could identify letters just fine, could even recognize some words, but when he tried to read, everything became terribly mixed up in his head. One day, I asked the teacher if I could try teaching him Braille. It was a long shot, of course, but since he wasn’t making any progress otherwise, it was worth trying. The results were nothing short of remarkable. He took to Braille with alacrity – and was soon reading the same primer with his hands that his eyes delivered to his brain in a jumble. It was one of my first real “aha” moments, a moment of understanding how a different kind of disability works. Bert’s apparent problem was a visual impairment. Yet, as it turned out, his greater obstacle had more to do with how his brain was wired for receiving and interpreting information. A few years later, I found myself sharing an apartment with a girl who was quadriplegic. I’d never known anyone with a wheelchair before and, for the first four weeks of our friendship, I had terrible dreams. She had only a manual chair back then, and in my dream we were setting out to some destination on campus. She would give me directions (I happen to be blind) and I would push. It worked just fine until – in the dream – we came to a steep hill and I lost control of her chair. What I soon came to realize was that I was experiencing the same initial fear and learning curve in understanding my new friend’s quadriplegia that so annoyed me from others in comprehending my blindness. Throughout 25 years of interviewing hundreds of people with disabilities for my books, columns, and features, I have developed a kind of passion for getting inside the heads of people with myriad disabilities, wanting to see the world as they see it, be a person who “gets it” with regard to understanding their particular differences and needs in the same way that I long to be accepted and have mine understood. That insatiable curiosity and passion for connecting has, I think, afforded me some rare and wonderful moments. In my other role – that of advocate – which has included ten years of governor-appointed positions, dozens of conferences, boards, councils, protests, and more – it has seemed to me that some of us with disabilities have the same level of discomfort at times that we lament coming from the nondisabled population. We all know the kind of garbled understanding the uninitiated sometimes have in grasping the essence of our individual disabilities. If you’re blind, people shout or wonder aloud how to get you up the stairs. If you’re in a wheelchair, someone offers you a Braille menu. If you’re deaf, they think you can’t speak for yourself. If you have a cognitive disability, they think you can’t choose your own sandwich to eat or sweater to wear. If you have asthma, epilepsy, or diabetes, there are those who think you’re a faker. And, heaven forbid, if they learn you take medication for bipolar disorder, there are those who think you must be dangerous. Within the disability rights movement, some of those kinds of attitudes – albeit more subtle – still lurk in our hearts and minds, too, as we regard those with disabilities different from our own. It may sound corny, but with unity and solidarity, our power increases. The more I learn about you and you learn about me, the stronger each of us will be in securing employment, housing, transportation – or just a place at the table – for ourselves or another. Since Congress passed Resolution No. 176 in 1945, federally designating the first week in October each year as National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week, we have had this special October focus on disability awareness. In 1962, the language was updated to say “disability” and in 1988, the period was stretched to a month. While the month is sponsored by the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities, and the emphasis is still on employment, the month is also seen by many groups as a time to increase awareness in general. There’s plenty of work to be done in changing attitudes and eliminating barriers in the public arena at large, but I believe it’s equally important that we take time to educate one another. When you speak out for all kinds of disabilities and have some understanding of those other issues, your voice is stronger. And if I do, so is mine. Deborah Kendrick is an award-winning writer, editor, and poet. She works currently as a newspaper columnist and as senior features editor for AccessWorld. PLEASE NOTE: PORTIONS OF THIS WEB SITE ARE UNDER CONSTRUCTION! |
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